The Divider.(HBO's mini series, John Adams)

The history of our Revolution will be one continued lie from one end to the other," John Adams grumbled, in 1790, when Benjamin Franklin was on his deathbed. "The essence of the whole will be that Dr. Franklin's electrical rod smote the earth and out sprang General Washington." The neglect of posterity was a prospect that Adams could not abide. And now he doesn't have to. HBO's seven-part miniseries "John Adams," which premieres on March 16th, tells Adams's tale, with Paul Giamatti in the title role, scowling beneath fifty-seven different wigs. "He United the States of America" is the miniseries' motto, giving credit to Adams foreverything. Franklin (Tom Wilkinson) is a rascal; Washington (David Morse) is a sapskull. Jefferson (Stephen Dillane) is distracted and, finally, deluded. And poor Thomas Paine seems never to have been born. Based on David McCullough's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, "John Adams" is animated as much by Adams's many private resentments as by the birth of the United States. It is history, with a grudge.

"One night in 1759, when Adams was twenty-four, and just starting out, he woke up, seized with an aching void in his chest. He picked up his quill, reached for his ink pot, and wrote in his diary, "I feel anxious, eager, after something. What is it?" It was the same thing it always was: the pain of insatiable ambition. "I have a dread of Contempt, a quick sense of Neglect, a strong Desire of Distinction," Adams wrote that night. Say what you will about the man who became our second President, he knew himself well. Giamatti's finely crafted John Adams is a little easier to take--he's the Ebenezer Scrooge of the American Revolution, slouchy, grouchy, and crusty, but mushy on the inside.

"John Adams" begins with the Boston Massacre, on March 5, 1770. By the dim light of a quarter moon, eight British grenadiers have fired into a crowd of Bostonians rioting on King Street. Adams, in a daze, stumbles over the bodies of the dead and the wounded, and trudges home through the blood-stained snow, speechless at the agony of what he has witnessed. "I have no words for it, Abigail," he whispers to his wife (exquisitely played by Laura Linney).

Abigail, wise, fierce, and long-suffering, is Adams's anchor, the brake on his pride, his most astute adviser. After the British soldiers are charged with murder, Adams agrees to defend them in court, defying his fellow Sons of Liberty, including his rabble-rousing cousin, Samuel Adams (Danny Huston), who wants nothing more than for the redcoats to hang. The night before he is to deliver his summary to the jury, Adams, in his nightshirt, paces the floor of his bedchamber, while Abigail, tucked beneath the covers, reads a draft of his statement. Impatient for her critique, he opens and closes the bed curtains, a scene that's a nice play on the eighteenth-century phrase "curtain lecture" (a shrewish version of what we mean by "pillow talk"). "Vanity. You have overburdened your argument with ostentatious erudition," Abigail observes, steering her husband, as always, onto a better course.

We then follow Adams to Philadelphia, where he serves as a Massachusetts delegate to the First Continental Congress. In the wake of Parliament's passage of the Coercive Acts (which included a measure closing Boston Harbor to trade), Adams is tireless but unable to persuade delegates from the other colonies to support a struggle that, so far, looks to be Boston's fight. He heads home, defeated. But on April 19, 1775, just before Adams is to travel back to Philadelphia for the Congress's second meeting, shots are fired in Lexington and Concord. From his farm south of Boston, Adams races to the scene and rides through the bloody fields, once again picking a path over the dead and the wounded. "There can be no mistaking Britain's intentions now," he tells Abigail.

Back in Philadelphia for the Second Continental Congress, Adams ardently argues for declaring independence. Imagine an animated version of John Trumbull's famous painting of the signing of the Declaration of Independence--the image engraved on the back of the two-dollar bill--and you've got a pretty good idea of the scene. Independence, this miniseries would have you believe, was almost entirely Adams's doing. As history, and maybe even as television, this is a hard argument to make, because although Adams presented the case to Congress, it was Thomas Paine who convinced the American people to support independence and Thomas Jefferson who wrote the document declaring it. "I am obnoxious, suspected, and unpopular," Giamatti's Adams tells Jefferson--a line taken from one of Adams's letters, like much of the dialogue--graciously ceding the task of drafting the Declaration of Independence to the Virginian. Adams forever regretted this. "Jefferson ran away with all the stage effect," he complained, "and all the glory."

There is much that is wonderful in "John Adams," which was produced by Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman, who also launched HBO's 2001 miniseries "Band of Brothers." Giamatti and Linney brilliantly portray the tenderness, loneliness, and passionate understanding that marked John and Abigail's half century of marriage. Eighteenth-century Boston, and much else besides, is beautifully realized: lush and bustling, with ships' masts looming and halyards clanking. If there's ...